It sure looks like it died of hypothermia. If they investigate around this small depression and dig through some snow, they can find several more deer - it seems like a whole herd might have ended up trapped here and frozen to death.

The beacon uses a hot-air balloon to rise high above the ground, and Fresnel lenses (thankfully found intact inside the workshop) to send a rotating beam of light out, like a lighthouse's slow pulses. It's visible from a distance even in the daytime, and only requires a stream of electricity to constantly travel up the long tether cable.

The hunters grin, doing their best to mark the location of this bounty. They bring all the deer they're able to carry, rushing back to the settlement, giddy with glee.

Meanwhile, the beginning of the ropeway system gets built, as the hinged pylons, steel cable, and wooden baskets to carry heavy loads of coal start getting built; the first pilot project is a ropeway with 2 pylons partway towards one of the closer piles of coal, intending to lighten the load and let heavier loads of coal get carried back, reducing the number of people needed to gather all the coal that's needed.

It's evening again by now. How are they doing on translating the English writing? It's probably fairly difficult to get much of anywhere, for all that there are a lot of informative pictures.

They're not making much of an effort of translating the English, really; they feel it'd be largely hopeless given the small corpus material and such little context for understanding the meanings of individual words and sentences. They have faith that someone who can understand what is written will be attracted by the beacon quickly enough that they won't really need to do the work themselves, really.

The temperature remains the same overnight. The scouts spot what might be a smoke plume or might just be a mirage of some sort in the far distance. They're probably going to need a long-term source of wood and steel, once the easy scrap is gone.

The steel mill will be fantastic to get working; it would even permit a satellite base, letting workers in the steel mill live nearby in homes heated by the steel mill's operations! The planner does remain quite worried about a sustainable source of wood; even a method to somehow let trees grow would be agonizingly slow. The ideal would be finding a substitute construction material, but none of the 40 know how cement gets made, so that'll prove incredibly challenging, to say the least.

Does the seeming plume of smoke move like smoke? Does it spread out, thin out, and get moved like the wind? Does it form the reasonably even clouds generated from a running coal generator? At this point, more people only mean more hands to build a better world for everyone.

It's little more than a faint haze on the horizon, difficult to see through the wind and snow. But it's persistent. And slowly moving left.

That can be reasonably assumed to be a plume of smoke! And judging how crude everything they've seen so far is, there's a real chance that the people there aren't dressed in thick, modern snowsuits designed to keep them comfortably warm on the coldest day of the year! One of the scouts walks a bit in front of the others, as he makes his way towards the direction that the smoke is coming from.

At length, they come to a wide canyon with a good view. There are several other landmarks like possible wrecks or abandoned buildings. In the distance off to the left, there's a steel suspension bridge spanning the gap. The plume of smoke is much larger now, but its source is not quite visible, hidden by a line of hills.

Can they finally see the source of the smoke, if they attempt to clamber up the hills, or perhaps cross the canyon on the suspension bridge?

It's-

-A vast metal vehicle, the size of multiple apartment buildings, trudging along on treads whose individial links are the size of cars, despite every reasonable engineering practice saying this ought to be impossible. Four massive smokestacks and a low rumble sound from the behemoth, and ice encrusts much of the upper works. There are lights in a few of the windows.

How vaguely offensively nonsensical! They didn't think to bring any flares; do they manage to bring any attention to themselves by attempting to reflect the sun off a piece of metal, in the general direction of the massive thing?

They receive flashes of light, long and short, from some sort of spotlight near the front! Clearly a message of some sort. The thing doesn't stop or turn, though.

They shrug; they don't know how to communicate via flashes, probably something that they should have tried learning, in retrospect, before walking back towards their home base. They're excited to enjoy a proper meat-filled feast, together with everyone else in the cookhouse, as they make their way home.

On the way back, if they take the most direct route instead of retracing their steps, they'll see a red flag waving in the wind in a small valley.

A red flag; very likely a marker for a cache of some kind. Do they see anything else? If not, they might as well see if they can improvise some way of marking the compass direction to their settlement in some way.

There are weird dark spots around it? Maybe holes in the ground?

The weird dark spots could easily be heaps of coal, oil or supplies. After padding the area with their best tools, do they get any information on what it might be? Soft, hard, do the spots make a sound of any kind? Then they investigate closer, and see if whatever the red flag marks is of any interest or value.

The weird dark spots, once actually approached closely, are holes! Small ice caves- And people are inside the holes, huddling close, lethargic and freezing and clearly in very poor shape. Men, women, children- About fifty in total.

More is better! Now the settlement will be able to undertake vast capital improvements and enjoy some semblance of the prosperity produced by deep economies of scale and specialization of their home civilization. The scouts, realizing that they look rather bizarre in their snowsuits with face-obscuring helmets, do their best to try persuading the 50 people inside the holes to begin following them towards their home settlement, taking off their helmets and trying to be as friendly as possible in their gestures attempting to lead them back.

The poor souls sheltering in snow caves are mostly too weak to really follow them. At least half are severely sick. The kind of sick that means they'll likely die without treatment. Some of the stronger ones try to help bundle up their fellows for a trip, or mime about sleds and dogs, or possibly trucks, when mutual incomprehension is established.

Then the only valid option will be calling for help, from their main settlement. The most athletic of the scouts races home, wanting to inform the rest of the settlement, as the remaining scouts work to see how many of the severely sick that they might be able to transport to their home settlement if all 40 chose to contribute, and how many would be forced to stay behind. The thomassian scouts would gladly leave one of their number behind, in order to provide whatever treatment they can for the ailments of the frailest people, who are to be brought in by a fresh team of thomassians sent to these caves.

The least-sick locals are dragging over half a dozen old sleds and making to load everyone up whilst still sheltered from the worst of the cold, while the frailest ones can do little but try their best to cooperate with this. While their conditions are poor and somewhat alarming, they can mostly still stagger to their feet. One is a small girl, age eight or so, sunken cheeks and milky white eyes damaged by exposure to the cold.

It seems like they're very determined to leave this place. They're miming boxy shapes and towers and warming their hands on a fireplace. The Thomassians are from a settlement, right??? A warm one? They should go there! Now!

The thomassian scouts pull as much of the weight as they can; they're universally highly athletic, but the need for endurance has limited the amount of muscle packed onto their frames. The scout ahead of the others does his best to prepare a welcoming party, wanting to be able to leave the entire cookhouse and adjoining properties open when the newcomers finally arrive, as well as attempting to organize a party to gather all the meat from the frozen deer found out in the snowy wastes.